Applause filled the room. Everyone was impressed by Ganin’s brief introduction.
Of course, who wouldn’t admire Ganindra Wibisana?
Dinan had once admired him deeply. Once.
Dinan joined in the applause, but stopped too soon. When she realized it, she clapped twice more—louder than necessary—making the person beside her turn to look.
She smiled stiffly.
Dinan barely remembered how she managed to leave the conference room without directly crossing paths with her new supervisor.
She spent the rest of the day focused on finishing the pile of work she’d cursed out earlier that morning. The papers helped save her from having to face lunch. Dinan even turned down Tara’s invitation to eat together.
The clock read ten past five. She should have tidied up the papers scattered across her desk a while ago and gotten ready to go home.
Dinan glanced at the tightly closed door of the finance manager’s office—the room Ganin would start occupying tomorrow. Then she let out a long, heavy breath. Today was only the beginning. How was she supposed to save face in front of Ganin tomorrow and every day after that?
Ganin remembered her.
Of course he did! Most likely, Ganin would remember the girl who chose a roundabout route home just to watch him play basketball on the court at the end of the street near their school. Dinan’s house was in the opposite direction, after all.
Dinan could pretend not to recognize Ganin, though that was obviously a terrible idea. How could she fail to recognize the man who, seven years ago, had been the reason she joined the school gardening club? All because Ganin spent his lunch break every day reading on a bench in the school’s back courtyard. It was directly across from the clubroom—a perfect spot for Dinan to stare at Ganin from afar without anyone bothering her.
Dinan couldn’t even tell a chili plant from a strawberry plant.
Memories from her long-buried high school years surged back to the surface. They spun rapidly like film reels, showing scene after scene, almost all of them enough to make the hair on the back of Dinan’s neck stand up.
Her head drooped limply onto her desk. She cursed her ridiculous behavior back then. No wonder Ganin had never paid her any attention.
Dinan entered the house looking dejected, and the unusual sight caught the attention of Halimah, her mother. Even when her day went badly, Dinan never came home from work looking like a corpse whose soul had been forcibly ripped out.
“What’s wrong, Nan?”
Dinan sat beside her mother, who was watching the evening news. She rested her head against the back of the couch as if it were the only thing keeping her from collapsing.
“I have a headache,” Dinan said. “Should I just call in sick tomorrow?” The question sounded as though she were asking herself.
Halimah pressed the back of her hand to her daughter’s forehead. No fever.
“You sound like a high schooler making excuses to skip school.”
Dinan closed her eyes. Back then, forget skipping school—even with a high fever, she would have tried to show up.
She really had been crazy. But for an eighteen-year-old girl, running into Ganin in the school hallway and feeling butterflies fluttering inside her was simply too precious to miss.
Was I really that obsessed with him back then? Why had Dinan never realized it? Everything felt several times more ridiculous and embarrassing now. She wanted to scream at the top of her lungs, hoping it would make some of her embarrassment evaporate.
Without realizing it, Dinan drifted off to sleep. Her attempt to banish those cursed high school memories only resulted in a long dream. For the first time since graduating high school, Ganin appeared in Dinan’s dream.